Final Word

Above all Emily Dickinson is a passionate and very personal poet whose poems reward careful reading. The poet, as she says in “This was a Poet—It is That” (#448, not assigned reading), “distills amazing sense from ordinary meanings,” and we find evidence of this distillation throughout her work.

The acclaimed writer, Joyce Carol Oates, says of Dickinson:

“No one who has read even a few of Dickinson's extraordinary poems can fail to sense the heroic nature of this poet's quest. It is riddlesome, obsessive, haunting, very often frustrating (to the poet no less than to the reader), but above all heroic; a romance of epic proportions. For the "poetic enterprise" is nothing less than the attempt to realize the soul. And the attempt to realize the soul (in its muteness, its perfection) is nothing less than the attempt to create a poetry of transcendence—the kind that outlives its human habitation and its name.”

(see “Additional Resources," next page, for a link to the full article)